You Can Stop Arguing, Here's What the Ending of Lost Meant

Six years on and many fans still can't agree on the ending of Lost. Were they dead the whole time? Was the ending in the future? Was it all a dream? Well, now cast member Michael Emerson (Ben Linus) is weighing in, and what he says may end the debate once and for all.

While speaking at the Walker Stalker Convention in Atlanta over the weekend, Emerson had this to say about the show's controversial conclusion:

"The one thing I'm sure of on the show is that everything you saw happen on the island really happened. Let's call that the first five seasons. All of that is real ... The ending is way in the future. Years, centuries, millennia have passed, and we're in an anti-chamber to the hereafter, to eternity, if you will. And all the characters on the show have come here to celebrate the end of life, and they're all gonna pass through to a happy afterlife, and just as in a Shakespeare, everybody goes two by two. It's couples. And that's because, I think, by the rules of Lost, you can only pass into heaven, if you want to call it that, with a mirror redeemer - with someone who has loved you without reservation. For yourself. Everybody had that, I think, except for Benjamin Linus. That's why he can't go. That's why he has to wait. He needs to find his mirror redeemer."

So there you have it. Emerson subscribes to the same theory that I do, that is, the events on the island really happened and the "flash sideways" in season 6 took place in what we would call purgatory. Everyone had died by that time, some on the island and some off, but they all united in the afterlife because they were linked by their time on the island.

Where he loses me is on the couples thing, however, since not every character in the afterlife was there with their "mirror redeemer" as he calls it. Hurley was there alone, as was Boone, and Locke. So Ben probably just wasn't there because he was generally a bad guy. Sorry, Ben.

You know what, I don't think Emerson has solved the mystery of Lost at all - he's just added something new to speculate over!